For an actor appearing in a new play, the most exciting time is the opening night, plus, if you are lucky, the day or two after, when the reviews and congratulations roll in. That’s what everyone assumes. Wrong. The truly stimulating time is not end of the process but the beginning—the days and weeks leading up to the opening when you are in the rehearsal room and, after that, on a bare stage.
On the first day of rehearsal, you sit around a table with the director, the playwright, and the other creative people, reading through the script. Later, you get the play “on its feet,” blocking scenes: how you enter and leave, when and where you move. Next, you memorize your lines and get “off book.” All the time you’re working on your character: Who is this person? What is he really like? How does he relate to the other characters in the play? For a performer this is what it’s all about—creating a living, breathing stage character.
I’m an actor, Matt Johanssen, and at the time this story begins I was in just such a situation—rehearsing a play headed for Broadway. Entitled The Unwitting Executor, it was written by a young playwright, Elliot Webster, about a dysfunctional family—naturally. Ninety percent of the new plays in the post-millennium era were about family members at each other’s throats, figuratively if not literally. Webster, however, was far better than most of the “emerging” playwrights, producing sharp, pungent dialogue that was often extremely funny. He also had a keen sense of character.
In The Unwitting Executor, a well-to-do uncle has died, and, since he has no children, he has left everything to his sister’s family, which consists of a husband (a borderline alcoholic); the wife, who feels she was robbed of a singing career when she got pregnant and married her husband; and their three children, all in their late teens or early twenties. The uncle, who rarely saw the family but was aware of their problems, has not made specific bequests to individual family members, but rather has appointed an executor to his estate who is to visit the family, get to know them, and then decide who gets what. This uninvited executor, a long-time friend and colleague of the uncle’s but not known to the family, is a sort of other-worldly figure brought in to uncover long-standing animosities and perhaps ameliorate them. Naturally, the family members vie frantically for his attention and favor. I was playing the role of the executor.
On our last day of rehearsals before we moved from the studio to the theatre, we put in a new scene, a good example of the kind of thing that happens when a new play is in rehearsal. Carol Saunders, the actress who plays the younger sister in The Unwitting Executor, was a promising young performer, talented as well as versatile. Twenty-two or -three, she looked younger and could easily play a convincing eighteen-year-old. For some time she had been saying that our main scene together, hers and mine, was too predictable, too static. Her concern coincided with a general feeling I had about my role: playing the part of a seemingly neutral, independent character, I felt there was the constant danger that I would emerge as two-dimensional, a stick figure without any emotional qualities or idiosyncrasies.
Elliot, the playwright, had taken all this to heart and revised the scene between the two of us to provide more give and take. When he emailed it to us, I was impressed with what he had done. The idea was that Carol and I would get to the theatre about forty-five minutes early on Friday and go over the scene. If it seemed to be working, we would put it in Friday night.
In the original version the impulsive, seemingly spontaneous actions of Carol’s character appeared genuine, but, the way the scene was rewritten, this could have been playacting on the character’s part as a means of manipulating my character. On my side, Elliott had me doing a bit of the same. In the new version, most of the time I seemed totally sincere and appeared to be taking this free-spirited young lady at face value, but then he introduced a twist, a note of skepticism that suggested I was on to her game and was simply playing along with it, perhaps to get more insight into who she really was and discover what game she was playing.
When I arrived at the rehearsal hall, Carol was there ahead of me, as were the director, Rowan, and Connie, the stage manager. We went through the new scene once, merely saying our lines while Rowan set the blocking. Just as the new version was less static than the old one, so the movement now was more fluid: we circled around each other more, playing cat and mouse. Having established the blocking, we went through the scene for real, and it was one of those moments of discovery you have every so often in the theatre. Three or four minutes into the new scene, we knew it was clicking. We were taking turns throwing each other off-balance; there was thrust and parry, and far more emotion as well as uncertainty. Everyone agreed that the new scene should go in that night. The rest of the cast, seeing the spontaneity of the scene, the ebb and flow, were inspired to inject a bit of the same into their scenes with me. Without changing the lines, the overall effect was a freshness, an excitement, we all shared.
• • •
The Unwitting Executor was a coproduction of Dorothy Tremayne and the Centre Theatre Group, known as CTG. Dorothy had discovered the play at a workshop reading in SoHo and brought it to CTG, headed by artistic director Ardith Wainwright and managing director Freddie Stamos. Though a nonprofit organization, CTG had a Broadway theatre, the Adelphi, on 49th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. It was one of the smaller Broadway houses and ideal for new plays and small musicals.
Dorothy’s great love was for new work, both plays and musicals. Mostly, she supported off-Broadway ventures, but she also helped bring several promising plays to Broadway, and The Unwitting Executor was one of those. Not a dilettante—one of those producers who teamed up with twenty other non-creative backers just so her name could be “above the title”—she either produced plays herself or, as in this case, with a nonprofit company.
Though Dorothy’s passion was serious, worthwhile theatre, her interest did not exclude musicals, comedies, or even farce. But it was always theatre, never film or TV, and even with theatre she was wholeheartedly opposed to what she saw as the dumbing down of the art form, a good case in point being those Disney-type extravaganzas based on sophomoric films or cartoons. For her, the latter belonged in theme parks or Las Vegas, not in legitimate theatre.
When Dorothy first began to feel her way into producing, a character named Sybil Conway saw her as a “live one.” A severe, smart-looking, ice queen type, Sybil was in the mode of those razor-sharp heroines of ’30s and ’40s movies. Her ash blonde hair was short and carefully styled to frame her face, in the Anna Wintour fashion. With penetrating amber eyes and a clearly defined nose and chin, she was supremely sure of herself, always aware of the effect she had on everyone, men and women.
Sybil had made a career of searching out would-be producers she pegged as neophytes and glomming on to them like a succubus. But she was extremely clever, as well as subtle. She never approached her targets with a frontal assault. At first she was all helpfulness and consideration, offering her services, her experience, and her knowledge of theatre, with no hint of an ulterior motive. Inevitably, however, once she had established herself as a partner, she slowly but relentlessly enlarged her share of the operation: an increase in the size of her billing on posters, a larger percentage of the royalties, and so forth. All this, of course, even though none of the money invested had been hers.
When Dorothy first took up with Sybil, people warned her of Sybil’s reputation, but unknown to them Dorothy had her own agenda. She wanted to learn about producing as fast as she could, and she knew Sybil would give her a crash course. So, while everyone, including Sybil, thought that she was leading Dorothy down the garden path, Dorothy was doing exactly what she had set out to do: learn everything she could about the business as quickly as possible.
The crossroads, the tipping point, was a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, being produced by the Triangle Company, the chief rival of CTG as a not-for-profit theatre operating on Broadway. Unlike CTG, which presented a number of new works, Triangle concentrated mainly on revivals of overlooked or difficult-to-produce classics. That wasn’t the only difference between the two. Artemis D’Angelo, the artistic director of Triangle, was hot-tempered, whereas Ardith, the head of CTG, was cool.
For Triangle’s production of Streetcar, Artemis had lured Cheryl Marshall, a star seemingly lost to Hollywood, back to the theatre. Cheryl had been nominated for three Oscars, had won one, and had also captured two Emmys, but in interviews she always claimed her first love was the stage. Each year, however, the prospect of her returning to the stage seemed less and less likely. Artemis had dangled the role of Blanche DuBois in front of her, with a director of her choice, and she had said yes.
Secretly, Artemis and Sybil had always wanted to join forces. In terms of personality and ambition, they were definitely on the same wavelength, and this seemed the ideal opportunity. Dorothy had previously backed only new work, but Sybil had convinced her that bringing Cheryl back to Broadway would be a master stroke for live theatre, so Dorothy reluctantly went along. Rehearsals were about to begin when a film Cheryl had presumably finished insisted she had to return to re-shoot several key scenes. Under her theatre contract, she was allowed to bow out if that happened. Greatly underestimating Dorothy’s inner strength, Sybil and Artemis were sure they could persuade her to go along with the production without Cheryl. But Dorothy, knowing that she had been manipulated, pulled out. Not only that: she told Sybil that this was the end of their partnership and suggested that Sybil vacate her office within three weeks. Dorothy, of course, had always paid for everything.
Once she had recovered from the shock, Sybil began pleading, saying that it was all a misunderstanding and that she herself had been misled by Artemis. She and Dorothy had always worked so well together and had had real success with virtually everything they had produced. When that argument failed, Sybil hurled a stream of invectives at Dorothy. She became so vehement that Dorothy called in the young man from her outer office, and asked him to call 911, whereupon Sybil walked out. Because Dorothy’s enhancement funds had been the linchpin for the production, it had to be cancelled, much to the embarrassment of both Artemis and Sybil.
People were surprised by Dorothy’s show of strength, but I wasn’t. To me it had been coming on for some time—several months, in fact. I had first met Dorothy some ten or twelve years before when she was still married to Warren Tremayne, long before she had become a theatre producer. Warren was a successful mid-level hedge fund operator in the ’90s and early 2000s with whom I had invested for a time and done quite well.
When Dorothy got divorced, four or five years ago, she got in touch with me, and we would meet once a month or so, and she would ask me about the workings of the theatre. In one of our recent meetings, before the Streetcar debacle, she confided to me that, more and more, she felt she should be her own person, stand on her own two feet, trust her instincts and not rely on others. I told her to go for it. “You don’t need Sybil,” I said. “You don’t need anyone.” I could tell she was ready, and she knew she was, too.
• • •
The day we put in the new scene between Carol and me was our last day working on The Unwitting Executor in the rehearsal studio. Although the whole process of putting on a new play is a challenge, the period we were in just now was particularly difficult. For several weeks we had been in the familiar confines of the rehearsal studio—a large, open rectangular space with only tape on the floor to indicate walls, doors, entrances, and exits. On Thursday, however, we would report to the Adelphi Theatre. Over the last few days, various crews had been moving in equipment: scenery, costumes, lighting, and sound gear. Our new schedule, Thursday through Saturday, would be rehearsals during the day and run-throughs each night. Technical rehearsals would begin on Monday. As we moved into this new environment, a lot of things had to come together; many things could go wrong. The plan was to have two days of technical rehearsals, then dress rehearsals before a small invited audience for the balance of the coming week. After that we would have a week of previews and then the opening.
Though we did not realize it at the time—nor did anyone else—on the same day we were putting in our new scene, something far more dramatic was occurring thirty blocks away at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.